Build a moodboard

What this is about

Words fail at describing looks: 'warm', 'clean' and 'premium' mean something different to every person in the meeting. A moodboard grounds the conversation in images — but only if it is curated, not collected. Twelve references pulling in one direction fix a look; forty references pulling in six directions document indecision. The board also manages expectations: when a reference comes from a production with vastly more money, the caption has to say which part of it travels to your budget — the palette and the framing, usually, not the crane and the crowd.

The order matters more than the tools. Skip a step and you usually notice two steps later — by which point the fix costs several times as much.

What runs differently here

In planning terms, that means:

• A moodboard fixes look and feel; a storyboard fixes frames. Confusing the two produces pretty boards that plan nothing.
• Captions are the working part: a reference without a note on what it proves gets read six different ways.
• Grouping by category — light, color, framing, wardrobe, grade — keeps the board an instrument instead of a collage.
• Achievability is part of the curation: every image should survive the question 'with our money, on our days?'

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Collect wide first: film stills, photography, ads, paintings — anything carrying the intended feel. Volume is fine at this stage; curation comes next.
2. Cut hard down to the images that agree with each other. A board that points in one direction decides; a board that points everywhere postpones.
3. Group the survivors by category: light, color palette, framing, wardrobe and set feel, grade. Each category answers a different department's questions.
4. Caption every image with what it proves — 'this window light', 'this skin tone', 'this negative space'. Uncaptioned references get read as whole promises.
5. Mark the gap between aspiration and plan: when a reference outspends you, write which element travels and which stays behind.
6. Align the board with the client before the treatment locks, so the look is agreed while changing it still costs nothing.
7. Hand the confirmed board to DP, production design and wardrobe as a working document — it is their brief as much as the client's reassurance.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Mixing six looks on one board and calling the indecision 'range'.
• References from another budget class without a caption on what translates — the client buys the crane shot, you deliver the palette.
• Building the board after the treatment, when its only remaining job is decoration.

With TillyGen

In TillyGen the agreed look feeds the storyboard generation, so the frames the client reviews already carry the direction the moodboard fixed.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.